Some folks just can’t tell the difference.

This joker has just now gotten around to telling readers why they should vote no on Proposition 66, which was on the 2004 ballot. Better late than never, I guess.

Question: Is it OK, or not OK, for Congressmen to have sexual relations with 17-year-old pages?

Answer: It depends on which party that Congressman belongs to.

Alt. Answer: Oh, c’mon, you know they’re not equivalent. Date raping a 17-year old who still works for you is one thing, and sending dirty instant messages to someone who no longer does is another.

Patterico seems nonplussed, but I’m not. The Los Angeles Friggin’ Times – that same “news” paper that infamously sat on the Gropenführer stories until days before the 2003 election to derail the Governator’s election, has now gone and endorsed the guy for re-election. No, really.

At Mickey and Minnie’s divorce hearing:

JUDGE: So, Mr. Mouse, is it your position that you want a divorce because you think your wife is crazy?

MICKEY: No, Your Honor. I do not believe she’s crazy.

JUDGE: Then why did you say in your opening argument that she was crazy?

MICKEY: I never said she was crazy. I said she was F***ING GOOFY!

Proof here via Drudge. This video is not safe for work., but if you needed me to tell you that, neither are you.

UPDATE: Laura W., sitting in for Ace, has more.

Lovely. Carla Lewis, a white woman married to a black man, has now admitted that she lied to the authorities when she claimed to have returned home on October 3 to find racial slurs and references to the Ku Klux Klan painted in her house and pictures of her biracial children thrown upside down on the ground, and that she actually committed those acts herself. Funny-money quote:

Her report prompted King Salim Khalfani, texecutive director of the state branch of the NAACP, to urge the FBI and state police to take over the investigation becase, he said, he did not think the local sheirff’s department would take the charge seriously and pursue it has a hate crime.

Gee, I wonder why?

Via Opine Editorials, I recently learned of a blog called Marry in Massachusetts, whose blogger in chief calls himself/herself/itself Mass Marrier and uses the royal “we.” As his/her/its/”their” gay-marriage-obsessed name might suggest, Mr. Marrier was not happy with the recent California appellate decision upholding Proposition 22. He was even less thrilled with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to veto Ass. Bill 849, which would have violated it. In a manner that would make Goebbels proud, MM wrote in a comment:

Give it a rest. We have representative government, allegedly. Schwarzenegger was so off-base in that veto, I can only hope the high court there jumps all over him in their decision.

Apparently, MM thinks that courts can overrule vetos, which somehow violate “representative” democracy when a democratically elected governor vetoes a bill narrowly passed by a gerrymandered Legislature because it violates a democratically enacted initiative. When I pointed out the Prop 22 problem, he responded by making up nonexistent California law:

Proposition 22 amended the Family Code. It can be challenged in court on a variety of legal bases, as well as overturned by the legislature. That’s California law, and typical of most states.

It’s also a crock. California law – more specifically, Article 2, Section 10(c) of the California Constitution clearly states that the Legislature may amend or repeal an initiative statute only by putting the issue to a popular vote, unless the initiative itself says that they can amend it on their own (which very few initiatives do, and Proposition 22 is no exception). Even Mark Leno, the author of the blatantly unconstitutional bill in question, understands this. That’s why Section 8 of that turkey says this:

SEC. 8. The Legislature finds and declares that this act does not amend or modify Section 308.5 of the Family Code, as enacted by an initiative measure, to the extent that Section 308.5 addresses only marriages from other jurisdictions. The Legislature further finds that Sections 300 and 308.5 of the Family Code have been declared unconstitutional by a state coordination trial judge appointed by the Judicial Council, and the Legislature declares that the purpose of this act is to correct the constitutional infirmities of Section 300, which was enacted by the Legislature. The Legislature further finds that the constitutional infirmities of Section 308.5 of the Family Code, which was enacted through the initiative process, cannot be corrected by the Legislature and that the California Supreme Court is the governmental body that has authority to make a final determination regarding the meaning, validity, or invalidity of Section 308.5.

… rather than this:

SEC. 8. Section 308.5 of the Family Code is repealed.

I alerted MM to the infirmity of his argument thusly:

Wrong again. Can’t speak to “most states,” but in California, initiative statutes cannot be amended or “overturned” (I think the word you’re looking for is “repealed”) by the Legislature without a popular vote. The only exception is where the initiative specifically provides that it can be amended or repealed by the Legislature (very few initiatives do, and Prop 22 is no exception). The California Constitution (more specifically, Art. 2, Sec. 2(c), but who’s counting?) is very clear on that point.

To which MM responded:

Whoops, you got me there. That’ll teach me to spout off about laws I know nothing about without researching them first. Thanks for the tip!

Yes, the legislature can make a law that conflicts with and supersedes an initiative. Also, if you nose around here, you’ll find that we are in the camp that finds ballot initiatives much abused. They are like law suits, in which people can sue for almost anything. An initiative can pass that courts rule violates various laws and constitutions. One can pass that a legislature changes.

The smugness of we-passed-an-initiative-so-there is part of the process and larger picture. Initiatives are not absolute, even in California.

You are welcome to make your points on Opine.

On the one hand, the guy is a real ass to repeat a frivolous legal theory even after being shown the citation to the specific law that makes that theory frivolous. On the other, it sure was nice of him to “welcome” me to a blog he has nothing to do with. It’s too bad that the fact that California has a constitution, and that the words contained in such constitution might actually mean something, is a point that he’d rather not be confronted with there.

Chyrotia Graham, the alleged scumbag of an alleged woman who was allegedly arrested for allegedly using her infant son, Jarron Troop, as a club to hit her alleged boyfriend, Deangelo Troop, is arguing that she “didn’t know her baby was a baby” at the time of the incident. Apparently Troop, the intended victim of her assault, agrees:

“People are trying to make a big deal about it, but she did not do it on purpose. … It was just a mistake,” he said.

Just an itty-bitty mistake, which anyone could have made. I mean, what mother has never hated the father of her child so much that she’d love to pick up any large object in sight, without even checking to make sure it isn’t … her own goddamned kid? OK, so maybe Graham made an itsy-bitsy boo-boo, and now her kid suffered a fractured skull and a bleeding brain, all because she hates her son’s father more than she loves her son. Don’t make such a big deal out of it. Gee whiz. Nobody’s perfect, ya know.

To his credit (?), Troop himself seemed to think it was a bigger deal at the time of the incident:

Police said Troop punched Graham in the eye after she put the baby down, and police photos later showed her eye blackened and swollen shut.

Authorities said there was no indication that Troop had hit his son but that they were reviewing the case to see if any charges might be warranted.

“I don’t anticipate any at this time,” Erie police Capt. Frank Kwitowski said Monday.

That’s understandable. I don’t think Pennsylvania law allows the authorities to prosecute someone for not hitting his victim hard enough.

If Rick Ellensburg … um … I mean, Glenn Greenwald isn’t a registered Democrat, he should be. Just when I thought they’d reached the bottom, commenter Blubonnet proved me wrong. This is a party Michelle Malkin wants to reward with half a vote, while Ace, the Commie (and, briefly, Allah) and the rest of the Coalition of the Shrillin’ have threatened to do worse. Bill Bennett has more.

Bottom line: be careful what you vote for. You just might get it.

Michelle Malkin unintentionally underscores why everything you read in the blogosphere, with the possibile exception of damnum absque injuria, should be taken with a large grain of salt. When composing the original version of this post, which was based on absolutely nothing except Mickey Kaus’s idle speculation, Malkin could barely contain her glee:

Well, I hate to say I told you so. But I told you so.

On Sept. 14, I wrote:

Yes, I know. The House voted to approve a 700-mile fence at the southern border…But forgive me if I don’t break out the pom-poms over this. There’s no funding for the fence, which will take years to build if it ever does get funded. There are so many other immediate reforms that could have been adopted this year that would have strengthened immigration enforcement, closed deportation loopholes immediately, and provided true relief at the border. (And don’t even get me started on this administration’s renewed laxity at the front door, which has been thrown open to tens of thousands of new Saudi student visa holders while enforcement against millions of current visa overstayers remain virtually non-existent.)

The 700-mile fence vote is an election season gesture, and grass-roots conservatives who have watched the GOP squander away this issue afor six years are not going to be appeased by mid-September 2006 gesture politics.

[Emphasis in original.]

Of course, on Sept. 14, Malkin didn’t write that Bush was going to veto the measure, nor even anything consistent with that theory; after all, if the bill were a ruse, why veto it? In that case the thing to do would be to sign it with as much fanfare as possible. Besides, it’s not as though President Bush is famous for vetoing all that many bills, nor any at all for being too right-wing. No matter – Malkin told you something bad that had something to do with a 700-mile fence, and now some guy with a laptop and a well-read blog is speculating that something else bad might happen that also has something to do with a 700-mile fence, and if that doesn’t vindicate Malkin’s position, then dammit I don’t know what will. Malkin also offers some horrendous voting advice, encouraging readers to sit the election out and allow the Democrats to take over both houses of Congress. Come December, Michelle, when President Bush can’t do a f’ing thing to Kim Jong-Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinnejad without getting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on board, we’ll be the ones who hate to say we told you so. The difference is, we really will hate having to say it.

Scroll further down on Malkin’s entry, through the updates. You won’t find an admission that Malkin was wrong, either by pooh-poohing the bill as inconsequentail on Sept. 12, or for parroting baseless predictions of a veto today. All you will find is the proof that she was wrong, namely an update linking to Patrick Ruffini’s email to K-Lo at N-Ro. That email states clearly what most blog readers and almost all non-blog readers have assumed all along: Bush will sign the bill, or so the Trilateral Commission would have you believe.

UPDATE: Malkin has revised her post to acknowledge her “I told you so” was premature. In the update, she writes in response to this entry:

And this one item won’t be a reason for sitting out the election. Xrlq lays into me. Point taken, though nothing he says rebuts my argument that many other more immediate immigration enforcement steps could and should have been taken ahead of this fence gesture.

True, but there’s a reason for that. The reason I didn’t rebut Malkin’s argument that many more immediate immigration enforcement steps could and should have been taken a long time ago is because I happen to agree with that argument. I do not agree, however, that the issue is nearly as cut and dried as Malkin suggests; if memory serves, the now-Republican House did favor a pretty strong border control bill that couldn’t make it through the RINO Senate. And I have yet to hear a single coherent, or even not-insane argument by conservatives in favor of willfully allowing the Democrats to take over either house, let alone both. Especially if border control is your number one issue. President Bush has been clamoring about the need for a non-amnesty amnesty bill for years, which has always been a non-starter in the Republican House. Put the Democrats in charge, and that just might change.

UPDATE x2: Heh.